Can I run Blender on my universities server through SSH?
Yes, this is absolutely possible. With SSH, you can access the command line remotely (as SSH is Secure Shell). If you have the command line blender installed on the server, you can run a command to render a .blend file.

In some situations we want to increase the render speed, access blender remotely to render something or build scripts that use blender command line.
One advantage of using command line is that we don't need the X server (in case of Linux) and as a consequence we can render remotely by SSH or telnet.

To render an image:
blender -b file.blend -o //file -F JPEG -x 1 -f 1

To render a movie:
blender -b file.blend -x 1 -o //file -F MOVIE -s 003 -e 005 -a 


From http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual/Render/Command_Line
On CentOS, you would downloaded either by source, or with yum install blender. The yum method is better as it installs dependencies too. Root privileges might be necessary however. Contact administrator if you don't have them and ask him to install it. There are also pre-compiled binaries on Blender.org to eliminate the dependency issue.